Ancestry Magazine

It’s been over a year since Ancestry.com unveiled its popular Ranked Search to add to its traditional Exact Search. If genealogy is like finding a needle in a haystack, you can think of Ranked Search as a way to dig through less hay and find more of those precious needles.

Ranked Search helps you find your ancestors quickly and easily because it brings up the best possible matches first in your list of search results. In addition, it gives you the option of perform ing event-based searches, meaning that you can specify a date and place of birth and/or a date and place of death in your search criteria. And, to make it even easier for you to decide where to look first, the search results page reveals more information about your matches right away. You can now see the most relevant matches from all Ancestry.com databases on the initial search results page, complete with basic information about birth, marriage, and death events.

How Does It Work?
Ranked search results are returned in order of relevance. Relevance is determined by comparing your search criteria with the information found on a genealogical record. The closer the match, the more relevant that record is to your search. Matches can be “close” in a number of different ways on genealogical records. For example, the names Johnson and Johansen are phonetically close to one another. Similarly, the names Bob and Robert are closely related as cultural variations of each other. New Hampshire is closer geographically to Maine than to California. Likewise, 1907 is closer to 1908 than to 1903 in a chronological sense.

Ranked Search automatically returns alternate spellings and abbreviations for your ancestor’s name(s). An exact name match is the closest match, and therefore the most relevant, followed by name matches based on typographical, cultural, and phonetic closeness. Additionally, Ranked Search uses chronological closeness as a factor in determining the relevance of date matches.

Example 1: James Otho Sharbrough
A ranked search for James Otho Sharbrough (born in Mississippi in 1882, died i n Texas in 1936) returns five appropriate records in the top ten results. The first appropriate match (and the first on the list of possible matches) is a tree for “James Otto Sharbrough”, where we find “Otto” as a mis-spelling of “Otho.” We also find a 1920 census record for “J O Sharbrough” and a 1930 census record for “James O Sharbrough.” These are all appropriate records with different spellings or abbreviations.

Notice that the relevance ranked search automatically searched for different potential abbreviations of the name James Otho Sharbrough. This means that you don’t have to run three different variations of exact match searching to find these three records.

Also, notice that the birth date on James O Sharbrough’s 1930 Census record is estimated to be 1886, whereas the search criteria was for an 1882 birth. Although the record appears to be “off” by four years, based on previous research, this is the correct James. Either James forgot his birth date or the census taker made a mistake on the census form. Because the relevance-ranked search looks for close matches in terms of chronology, the 1886 record is a good match.

Example 2: Charles Peter Splonskowski
A ranked search for Charles Peter Splonskowski (born in South Dakota in 1889, died in South Dakota in 1969) returns seven appropriate records in the top ten results, the other three were actually records for Charles’s spouse, Marcella. Notice that not only did this search return appropriate name abbreviations, it also returned several records where Charles’s name did not exactly match the search criteria (due to transcription errors or inaccuracy on the records), but the matches were still appropriate.

For example, a record for Charles Paul (not Peter) Splonskowski was returned from the Family Data Collection. This is the right Charles, but the source record incorrectly lists his middle name as Paul rather than Peter.
Another appropriate match is the 11th match returned—a 1920 census record for Obar P. Splonskowski. In this case, the original census record appears to read “Obar” rather than Charles. Based on other information already known about his household, this record really is for Charles.

Finally, if you narrow your search to the 1930 US Federal Census (by clicking on the links on the left hand of the search results), the second best match from the 1930 census is for Charles Splonskoreosk (this is really our friend Charles Splonskowski). In this case, the name on the census record was incorrectly indexed on the Ancestry.com website. The relevance-ranked search was able to return misspellings and other close name matches where the other search criteria (birth date/place and death date/place) were strong matches. The records for Charles’s wife, Marcella Devine, were returned because Charles was mentioned somewhere on the record.

Example 3: George Feulner
A ranked search for George Feulner (born in Germany in 1856, died in Utah in 1931) yielded four appropriate records in the top five results. One of the appropriate records that was returned was for Georg (not George) Feulner, the name George originally went by in his homeland of Germany. The relevance-ranked search automatically searched for common nic knames and language variants of first names in order to produce this result. This means you don’t have to think of every possible nickname or foreign spelling of a name in order to achieve success. In the future, Ancestry.com plans to expand this foreign spelling concept to include geographical place names. For example, a search for Germany could return place names like Deutschland.

Don’t Forget Exact Search
To get the best possible results on Ranked Search, type in as much information as possible. The more search criteria the search engine has to match against, the more likely it is to pull the most appropriate records up to the top of your results list. Not sure about an exact date? Take an educated guess. As long as you’re within a few years, you’ll get much better results than if you leave a date field blank.

If you’ve filled out all of the information you possibly can on Ranked Search and you still can’t find the appropriate record(s), consider giving Exact Search a try. Remember, Exact Search functions much differently than Ranked Search, and thus requires a vastly different search strategy for success.
In Exact Search, each match must exactly match all of the search terms you enter. You should probably start an exact search with only one or two broad search criteria (e.g., a surname and a location). If you get too many results, gradually add more criteria to narrow your search. If you get too few results, drop one or more of your search criteria to broaden your search.

Although Exact Search does not automatically search for abbreviations and alternate spellings like Ranke d Search, you have the option of using the Soundex feature, which returns many phonetically similar surnames. Use the Soundex feature if you wish to broaden your results. Additionally, Exact Search supports the use of wildcards (special symbols such as the asterisk (*) and the question mark (?) that can be used to represent an unknown letter or group of letters in a word). You can use wildcards in Exact Search to manually hunt for alternate name spellings.

What’s Next?
Plans for subsequent versions of Ranked Search include allowing users to select which elements of their searches they’d like to make match exactly while the others are matched in descending order of relevance, adding an advanced search with more search fields that can be entered, and adding geographical closeness as a factor in determining the relevance of location matches. All of these upgrades, coupled with the continued dedication of Ancestry.com to improve the other matching capabilities of the search engine, will ensure that Ranked Search only gets better with time. Good-bye hay, hello needles!

Kendall Hulet is a product manager for MyFamily.com, overseeing the Search user experience. He has written several articles for academic journals that relate to Internet business practices.